Boxee Gets $4 Million

Open-source social media center Boxee has raised $4 million in its first round of funding from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, which split the round 50-50. Union Square’s Fred Wilson and Spark’s Bijan Sabet are lead investors.

According to a Boxee spokesperson, the funding will be used not only to keep the doors open but to hopefully instill confidence in potential partners, such as device manufacturers, that Boxee will be around for awhile.

Boxee is a free, open-source media platform initially based on the XBMC project that allows users to watch and share media like movies, music and more from Internet-connected devices hooked up to their TVs. The company went into alpha in June of this year.

The New York-based company was started in earnest in 2007 has 10 employees, eight of whom are in Israel.

It’s always notable when a company gets funding in this current economic climate, but what makes Boxee more intriguing is that much of the news about the service recently revolved around hacking it onto devices like the Apple TV, or unofficially integrating services like Hulu and CBS.com.